This essay developed out of a trip with a friend to the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History; but I only completed it as an answer to a comment on Slashdot yesterday.
It got pretty good feedback:
and even those posting the praise themselves got modded up (!), so I thought I'd post it again, hoping to let a wider audience see it. Yes, it is my own writing -- and thank you for the generous praise (and mod points).
But more than just seeing, I'd like to see your comments, especially about what you think should be included in a calendar of the last "ten years" of humanity's history. Whether you have a sentence to describe a "minute" -- that is, a particular year --, an "hour", or an epoch, let me know what for you are the highlights of the calendar. What should be the brief description for each "day"? "Dark Age to Atomic Age" or "Feudalism to Democracy" or "The Last Day of Scarcity" for the last day?
Take a look, and let me know your thoughts. Here's the essay, as it originally appeared:
Part of the challenge of learning history or understanding evolution (human or otherwise) is to begin to grasp the enormous differences and the great epochs of time -- time far, far in excess of the span of any single human's life, time measured in the millions of years -- that separate us from our origins.
Let's play a game by pretending that every year only lasts a minute. It's 2004 today, so, by this game's metric, a "minute" ago it was 2003, and thirty-five minutes ago -- a little over half an hour ago -- Neil Armstrong, in 1969, set foot on the moon. In these terms, World War Two ended just a minute less than an hour ago. Three hours and forty-eight minutes ago -- in 1776 -- Thomas Jefferson declared independence for one nation while, essentially simultaneously in our terms, Adam Smith revealed an Invisible Hand that regulated commerce among all nations.
Each hour is comprised of sixty minutes, each day of twenty-four hours, for a total of 1440 minutes per day. So by our scheme, one "day" ago, 1440 minutes ago, an English King named Riothamus -- or Arthur -- had just recently failed to keep south-western England from plunging into barbarity in 564. Since Arthur's reign, the rest of "yesterday" saw the Dark Ages in Europe offset by the flowering of Islamic science and mathematics, the rebirth of Europe in the Renaissance, the exploration and colonization of most of the world by Europeans, and, an hour ago, the beginning of the atomic age. All this in one busy "day".
Even given the brevity of our metric, compressing one year of 525600 minutes into a single minute, it's still easily possible to recite the salient historical events on a year in the sixty seconds we are given, and even include our own particular history: "1903: first heavier-than-air flight; Grandma born." or "1943: Battle of Guadalcanal, Allied invasion of Italy, Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazis, Dad born."
But what's most interesting isn't those years, like 1943, crammed full of events, but the far greater number of years which our histories don't distinguish from one another. Two days ago, 48 hours ago, we come to the year 875 BC (since there's no year zero, 1 AD being preceded immediately by 1 BC). While I'm sure that a historian of that era could come with an interesting event of that year, the nearest I can come up with is the ascension of Osorkon II to the pharaoh's throne in Egypt the next year in 874 BC. The remainder of day two will be pretty packed: Rome will be founded and will reign for most of the day, Christ will be born and crucified in a brief half-hour - but will give rise to over a "day" of Christianity.
Going back another day, three "days" ago starts with the year 2315 BC, right in the middle of Sargon of Akkad's creation of the first recorded empire, in Mesopotamia - and the first writing with a known author, Sargon's daughter Enheduanna's hymns. After Sargon and his daughter, the day will see the beginnings of monotheism and Judaism, the founding of Athens and the fall of Troy.
Four "days" ago opened with 3755 BC, just six years after 3761 BC, the first year of the Hebrew calendar. This "day" saw the beginning of writing, the use of sails and potter's wheels, and the first cities.
Five "days" ago was ushered in with the year 5195 BC. During this "day", man began using ploughs in Europe. Toward the end of the day is 4004 BC, the year Bishop Ussher reconstructed from the Christian Bible as the Day of Creation.
Six "days" ago, it was 6635 BC. This day saw the formation of the English Channel (!) as the glaciers melted, and the domestication of the cow.
Seven days ago, the first "minute" of the "day" is 8075 BC. This "day" sees the beginning of rice cultivation and the domestication of the cat.
Nine days ago sees the beginning of agriculture.
But Neandertals went extinct a full twenty-one days ago.
And it was a full month ago when the first humans of our sort (not Neandertal) entered Europe.
Human culture, in the form of rubbing red ocher on our bodies and burying our dead, began about forty-five days ago.
Sometime over three months ago, the total human population fell to about one thousands persons, in an evolutionary bottle-neck, and "Mitochondrial Eve" had her daughters, daughters who became the mothers of the entire now-living human race.
But it was a full year ago (half a million years ago in real terms) that our sort of human diverged from Neandertals.
Two "years" ago, modern humans were nowhere to be found; Homo erectus, with his stereotyped stone flaking, was the smartest biped.
Five "years" ago, Homo habilis appeared on the African savanna.
Eight "years" ago (in reality, about 3.9 million years ago) the dominant hominids were the Australopithecine.
And it was "only" ten "years" ago (five to six million years before present) that some mutation began the divergence of humans and chimpanzees from the same ancestral hominid.
But it was fully 125 "years" ago (65 million years ago) that the last of the dinosaurs died, allowing mammals to conquer the Earth.
It's been a long long time.
